1. Field
The present disclosure relates to methods and devices for performing maintenance on objects, including vehicles and buildings, especially aircraft.
2. Background
Platforms, including modern buildings and vehicles, may have several sensors used to measure various physical parameters of parts of the platform. In the case of aircraft, numerous sensors may be present to measure a wide variety of physical characteristics of various parts of the aircraft. The resulting sensor data may be used in performing maintenance on the platform.
For example, temperature sensors may be spread throughout an interior of an aircraft. These temperature sensors may be used to determine when maintenance on one or more parts of the aircraft's air conditioning system should be performed.
In most cases, these different sensors take data at different times. Thus, gaps in the data set may occur at a particular location. For example, in the temperature example above, a first temperature sensor may measure air temperature at the forward section of the aircraft at time T1 and a second temperature sensor may measure air temperature at the aft section of the aircraft at time T2. In this case, a technician may wish to guess accurately what the temperature measurement was at the second temperature sensor at time T1, or perhaps wish to guess accurately what the temperature measurement was at the first temperature sensor at time T2. As this data is often received and used after operation of the aircraft, during maintenance of the aircraft, it may be impossible to go back and obtain actual physical measurements.
A technician may wish to fill in the missing data using values that are as close to the unknown true values as possible. Additionally, when many sensors are present, a technician may face creating a vast number of missing data points. Thus, with large numbers of actual temperature measurements potentially missing, methods and devices are desired for automatically and accurately filling in any missing temperature measurements in a data set.
The above temperature example is only one narrow example of a problem in filling in missing data points. Many other examples are possible. Therefore, it would be desirable to have general methods and devices for filling in missing data points with respect to multiple sensor measurements in order to have the most accurate information possible when making platform maintenance decisions.